


time is broken

by utrinque_paratus



Series: der verstand steht still [1]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: (with what we have), Angst and Tragedy, Canon Compliant, Dark Stuff - be warned, Depression, Gen, Headcanon, Hurt, Implied David Mellenby/Thomas Nightingale, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Torture, Nazi Germany, POV Kelly, Post-Ettersberg, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers for The October Man, Suicidal Thoughts, The October Man, War Trauma, World War II, and all its according themes and crimes explored
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-23 16:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21323383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/utrinque_paratus/pseuds/utrinque_paratus
Summary: It is late January 1945, and Trier is twelve kilometres from the Western Front.There, a lone river spirit bereft of all hope and on her way to find death meets a lone British practitioner on the verge of death and with hardly any more hope to give.Aka, the meeting of Kelly and Nightingale.
Relationships: Thomas Nightingale & Kelly (Rivers of London)
Series: der verstand steht still [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1984297
Comments: 57
Kudos: 65





	1. dying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> German to English translations can be found at the end.

She had lived for more than a thousand years – most would think that time, and history with it, had already become irrelevant to her; not in the way of indifference – but rather like the waters of the river she stemmed from; always moving, fleeting, slipping through the fingers – a natural occurrence through which she watched and moved and observed.

And yet, time had been broken, and her spirit with it.

In the beginning, she had thought that Hitler and the depravity he brought in his wake would be just a new little war, a new little quirk that would expose the inherent malevolence of the human race and teach them a lesson. Just to be destined to be forgotten so that they could commit to all of their small-minded mistakes again a few decades later; when the edge of violence had lost its sting, when the taste of death and despair had left their mouths and the buried and lost had become one with the earth, the after-echoes of their screams ripped away by the ignorant to be twisted into something even more despicable.

Maybe there had been a version of her which had cared, once, long ago. Wanted to change the humans. Wanted to make a stand against the evil they produced, and the pretentious Weimar folk, _ die Praktizierenden_, who thought they could take spells and bend the force of nature to their own will. Thought they could stand above the beings to whom the essence of magic was innate.

Thought they could control them, and everyone else who didn’t fit into their limited way of thinking.

Kelly, once, when her waters flowed young and quick and clean, thought she could make them _ see_.

But they stayed blind.

And because they could not accept anyone standing above them - or next to them – or just because they lacked the understanding, because they did not even _ try _ to understand - they turned to fear. And through fear, they turned to documentation, in a feeble attempt to categorize. And to control. To collect. To capture. To experiment.

To kill.

The Nazis and what they did had been nothing new, and Kelly wanted to let time flow around them and herself move with it like she had done for so long.

But they had been the first to become efficient.

Countless beings touched by magic, and countless humans, just because they were not what the Nazis wanted them to be.

Dead.

_ They cannot harm us, _ Kelly had thought. _ They cannot. Nothing but nature itself can do that. _

And then they killed her sisters, and killed her mother, and time was broken.

And as they broke time, magic vanished through the cracks. And where magic had gone away, there was nothing left but death.

\------

She smelt it, clinging to them like a pest, next to a very real and penetrating stench of shit, smoke, sweat and blood.

Magic. Human-made magic.

And with them, they carried cold rumours becoming true, forming a suffocating hand around her throat.

The whispers had spread faster than their legs had carried them, despite Germany’s magical community being broken down to a wisp. And even without mumbled words painted with pictures of slaughter and destruction, and her own life’s force - and connection to what once came to her as natural as the feeling of water on her skin - draining away with every passing day, Kelly had known something had happened.

That night, there hadn’t been just a crack which had been left on the surface of time and magic. Kelly had felt a sinkhole of pitch black gradually opening up below her. It had been empty, and greedy, and it took – and took – and _ took_; a hungry monster, never satisfied. An endless spiral of magic, sucked away, as thousands of its lightened candles burnt out on the Ettersberg.

Not that any of the British or the German _ Praktizierenden _ had been the first to die on that hill. _ Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften _ had made sure that thousands of nature’s innately magical beings had found their painful end in that place.

But that had been a constant, torturous trickle over the past few years.

What had happened four days ago had been a waterfall.

They annihilated each other, the whispers said. Apparently, there were clouds of smoke above the Ettersberg which could be seen as far as Leipzig. Even two-day rain hadn’t been able to put out all of the flames. Who won? No one. Too many dead on both sides. The prisoners? They murdered every single one still alive after the battle was over. The British? Their attack force completely destroyed.

Or was it?

_ No_, a goblin girl had whispered, and there was this rare sparkle in her eyes, a sparkle which Nazi Germany had all but destroyed.

There were the myths, accounts which had accumulated during the course of the war. Kelly had heard them. They all had.

_ Die Nachtigall, _ the girl had said. _ He was there. He got out. Others got out. He saved what was left. _

The name put hope into some of them and fear into others. Some accounts claimed a heroic leader, remarkably strong in the human art of magic; looking after the weak, protecting as many as he could - fearless, exceedingly selfless. After whatever had happened at Arnhem, _ Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften _ had upped the price on Captain Thomas Nightingale’s head, dead or alive, to 50.000 _ Reichsmark_. A feat which was as intimidating as it was remarkable.

The others called him the devil. Once, a soldier, trembling so violently that she almost took pity on him, spoke of a cold and gruesome man – if you could call him that. A beast, slaughtering everybody who stood in his way in a battle-driven frenzy of insatiable rage and without remorse.

And Kelly found she couldn’t care less.

If there was one thing which was obvious to her, then it was that the British, after years of unanswered silence to their hidden cries of help, would never send their soldiers into a suicide mission 400 kilometres behind the Western Front as an act of benevolent empathy and sudden altruistic sentiment. At least not to free her people, much less the bigger death camp of Buchenwald. Or even just to give them back a margin of hope.

They came for power.

The humans always came for nothing else but power.

And if they wiped each other out while doing so, then good riddance. Nobody of them could ever undo what had been done. Nobody of them would ever be able to set things right again.

So, when they came - the puny and pitiful leftovers of the British _ Praktizierenden, _small ragged groups, split up along the lines of the Kyll, hurrying towards the Front – she stayed concealed in her river, watching. As she had always done since Mama died.

Astonishingly enough, a few of them made it. But there were also those who were shot down and ravaged by werewolf hunting parties last minute, and their blood and bowels ran down her waters.

And even when the echoes of their despaired screams for help and mercy wound their way through the _ Kyllbachtal _, even when she reminded herself that whatever they came for, they tried to destroy the institution that killed her Mama and Sisters – that they stood against Nazi Germany, not with them – she could not bring herself to care.

In fact, the only thing she seemed capable of feeling was emptiness. Parts of her soul, herself, her connection to the world – when she searched for them, she only found ragged holes, the edges seared away.

Even the pain and the grief, once appearing before her like an insurmountable mountain, had crumbled and buried her beneath it until the weight had become one with herself, numbing her to whatever love and hope that might have been left.

Time was broken, and her purpose with it.

\------

She barely swam as far as Trier these days. Not just because the city now rather resembled a fortress crawling with troops due to the advancing American army. Her powers were barely existent anymore as they were, and the further she moved away from the section where the Kyll merged with the Mosel and headed into her Mamas waters, the less they became, until they were but a dwindling drip in the back of her mind.

Otherwise, she would have long since followed the Mosel downstream into freed Luxembourg and sat out a return to her proper waters until the inevitable happened and the Allies finally managed to cross lands as far as the Rhine.

Not that they would meet any river spirits there who could lend them a helping hand.

They were all gone. She was, as far as she could tell, the only one left. The last of the Mosel sisters. Maybe even the last of the Rhine maidens. And with being the last, there came the only thing that she still clung to. A meagre thread keeping her functioning, doing _ something_.

Duty. Responsibility. Or something like it. Maybe it was just her naïve attempt to keep something alive that was long lost, or to keep her from an inevitable confrontation with a bleak future stretching out before her after the war was over.

Maybe, the world around her would recover and go on, if such a thing was possible after tens of millions of lives had been snuffed out for nothing. But she would stay alone. Her family, what others called nature’s magic. Too much harm had been done, and Kelly could not tell when, or even if recovery was possible. The only thing she could still do was to honour her Mama and her Sisters and the waters that had been poisoned and defiled.

Whatever that might be.

Until she found her own end.

Whenever that might be.

Suddenly, she stopped swimming, and stared through the grey, deep waters before her.

There had been moments where it had been so tempting – to just let go. Let herself be carried down the river until her powers left her altogether. Let her life’s force get sucked through the cracks, into another form, following where her fellow river spirits had gone. Or step out of the river and throw herself into the nearest group of werewolves, roaming the shores of the Mosel – all the more since the first, and probably last, stragglers of the British _ Praktizierenden _ had arrived after their forlorn flight across winter Germany.

As if they were searching for something specific.

Or someone.

If they were looking for the elusive last of the river spirits, they wouldn’t find her if she didn’t present herself to them. While they were able to sniff out human-made magic, she was still one with nature and the powers it gave to her. Even with all that had been ripped apart.

And Kelly found herself being more tempted than ever before to just let it end here. Let them find her.

She turned her head upwards and broke through the surface of the Mosel river, right below the old _ Römerbrücke_. 

Once, this place had been one of her favourite spots. Standing on the bridge, the stone beneath her feet brimming with the footprint of life amassed through passing centuries. And while the city around her grew and changed, and excluding that unfortunate event when the French decided to destroy the vault of the bridge in the late 17th century, the bridge pillars and the river beneath it had always been there, since she had been born, a monument – a constant – of time.

But time had been broken.

And when the Americans would come any nearer, Kelly was sure that the Nazis would detonate the _ Römerbrücke_, too.

Destruction – it was the only thing they were capable of. It was going to break, like everything else. Dying on top of it seemed like a fitting idea.

\------

She had climbed up the eastern shore, not caring if anyone saw her, made her way around the second of the nine pillars and a second later, she got her legs knocked from under her and found herself chest down and with a pistol trained on her head.

The stench of his magic hit her the moment the right side of her face made contact with wet grass. He probably hadn’t used any since days for her to not be able to smell him from the water.

“_Eine Bewegung, und du bist tot _," her attacker hissed; the pressed voice underlining his English pronunciation.

She didn’t honour him with an answer.

One moment, she thought if she should try and force his mind under her command. He probably felt something, because out of the corner of her eye she saw the barrel being jerked away, but Kelly had already decided that it wasn’t worth the effort.

She moved faster and with more strength than any mortal could hope to muster, and spun around, kicking both of her legs into his stomach. It should have sent him flying through the air, but he had been standing with his back pressed to the pillar, engulfed in its disguising shadow.

He didn’t make a sound as his body recoiled from the stone, folded into itself and sunk into the high grass and surrounding thicket next to her. At least, not a physical one - because suddenly, the only thing Kelly could hear was the after-echo of a half-formed spell that had broken down when her feet had connected with his body.

To her, human magic always sounded the same. Like an instrument not played in right tune, like the grating sound of chalk on a blackboard. Not one with the melody that nature dictated. Everything about it, simply, excruciatingly, _ wrong_.

Not this one’s.

His tune was something else.

Kelly wasn’t entirely sure _ what_. It still wasn’t in rhyme with what she understood as _ right_, but it wasn’t _ wrong _ either. And it reminded her of… something, something sad and melancholic and tainted, but still beautiful, still _ natural_.

And she didn’t know what was more surprising – that, or the fact that he had been fast enough to react with such an incredible speed that he had almost managed to defend himself.

She sat up and stared down at the man. He was lying on his side, curled into foetal position, with his hands pressed to the left side of his abdomen. An army greatcoat of the German _ Wehrmacht _ had been pulled over his frame, but it had slipped during the fall to reveal a green and brown lightweight uniform which Kelly immediately recognized as British. His clothes and face were soiled in a mixture of muck and dried blood, and long, unkempt stubble covered his face.

The pistol was lying next to him, discarded, and before he recovered and tried anything dumb, she grabbed it, stood up, and trained the pistol on his body herself.

Not that it was needed. He did make a small movement – taking one hand away from his stomach and pressing it onto the grass, the beginning of an attempt to regain some posture – only to slump down the same instant, fingers digging into the earth beneath him before he formed a quivering fist and rather pressed the nails into his own skin, all while his whole body was shaking with barely controlled spasms.

It was obvious that he had already carried some sort of injury. Her kick had been intended to incapacitate, but not enough to warrant that kind of pain.

“Fucking -,” he groaned, and opened his eyes, only to press them shut again. _"Fuck _,” he repeated, with the agony so palpable in the rasp of his voice that Kelly expected him to fall unconscious at any second.

He didn’t.

“You… a… _ genius loci _,” he wheezed instead, this time in English. “… river.” Apparently, he thought that she’d be well-educated enough to understand him. He wasn’t wrong. She’d been able to speak and read English several hundred years ago.

“We _ loathe _ being called that name, you know?” she answered in his language, and put a finger on the trigger.

“We thought… they’d finished the whole of you,” he continued, voice flat, as if he hadn’t heard, as if the threat in her words had fallen deaf to his ears.

There was a flash of hurt inside her – an ache so sudden and strong that it took her breath away.

“Not counting the pathetic leftovers I’ve observed these past days, I could say the same of _ your _ lot,” she said, trying to control the burst of anger that wrangled to overtake her, and she was so ready to fulfil the motion and just shoot him – and…

That was new.

She hadn’t thought she was still capable of feeling angry or, for that matter, hurt.

His eyes fluttered open. It took him more than a few seconds until his pupils managed to focus on the pistol she pointed at his head, before they came to rest on her face. They were of a pale grey colour – the colour of a sunless, broken sky, and shot through with prominent red lines.

“You gon’ kill me?” he asked, and for what it sounded like, he might have just as well asked her about a briefing on the weather, or the current date.

“Maybe,” she said after a pause. “Haven’t decided yet.”

“Well, do me a favour ‘n do it now,” he whispered. “Or give me back that gun.”

Kelly didn’t know exactly what it was, but something about it took the momentum of turmoil out of her and left her frozen. It was that notion of… emptiness. Indifference. As if he didn’t care. Just letting her make the decision over his life, throwing it away on a whim.

And of how it resounded inside her.

Silence stretched out as she did nothing but stare. All she could hear was the rush of the river and the splatter of chilled January rainfall on muddy ground, and the almost indiscernible sound of ragged, tormented breathing. Even the city remained quiet, despite it being high afternoon – a ghostly remnant of what Trier had once been; devoid of civilian life after last month’s evacuations.

Out of nowhere, Kelly had to think of the 50.000 _ Reichsmark _ and the picture printed above it, of a white man in his forties, with short brown hair and striking cheekbones and a pair of alert and lightly coloured eyes, and the vague imprint his spell had left in Kelly’s head, and all of a sudden, the blurred form took shape – changed into something she could grip, integrate it into how she perceived the world.

It had reminded her of birdsong. Like dying birdsong in winter, a last, desperate remnant of life and beauty fighting for survival in a world gone barren and cold.

She let the pistol sink down as realisation dawned over her – his British uniform, the near-perfect execution of magic, the huge presence of werewolves in the area.

They hadn’t been searching for her.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said. “_Die Nachtigall _.”

Taking in his reaction – the way how every muscle in his body seemed to turn rigid, his other hand leaving its position on his abdomen to help the other to push himself into a defensive position with an unexpected, explosive bout of strength, considering how he had just lain in the dirt, seeming feeble enough to hardly be able to make a single move – all of it told Kelly everything she had to know.

“And what if I am?” he hissed. His eyes had narrowed to slits, making the deep, dark lines and bruises adorning his features even more prominent – it reminded Kelly of a dangerous, cornered animal, ready to take flight or fight to the death.

She hesitated, considering what she could do or answer as to not prompt an immediate escalation of their situation, but going by what he said next, he had interpreted her silence as an answer in its own right.

“Going to rat me out?”

Whatever she might have wanted to say was erased from her mind by the pure offense she took from his proposition, and she had to constrain herself to not raise the pistol, still tightly gripped in both of her hands, back up to align with his head.

“What do you think? I’m a fucking river goddess. They took too much – _ too much _ – from me to do that kind of thing,” she spat. “Not to mention they’d shoot me to shreds the moment I handed you over to them, or imprison me for their merry little experiments, you absolute fuckwit. You were at Buchenwald, right? You and _ your people _ ? You saw what they are doing to us, _ right_? _ Your people _ -”

With grim satisfaction, she saw him flinch – brutally so. He cowered into himself, all his defensive bearings lost immediately, and turned his head away to face the ground. His hands made an upward motion, as if he had gotten the sudden urge to cover his ears to shut out her voice, but he didn’t quite complete the movement – instead, he forced them down again, one wandering back on his left side, the other on his thigh.

Kelly recognised submission when she saw it. He knelt before her, expecting judgement, leaving it with her goodwill to decide once more.

It should have been easy for her to finally raise the gun and finish it, _ she didn’t care _ , she had to remind herself – she didn’t care, what was she doing here, why was she even talking with him, and yet, Kelly could feel her heart racing against her ribcage, hurting, every beat reverberating within her body, _ anger _ , _ grief _, and Kelly didn’t know what to do with that, she had forgotten – months ago.

It had her overwhelmed; overwhelmed, as if it had some sort of purpose, and it left her paralysed.

Her finger didn’t pull the trigger.

So she kept talking.

“Why are you alone? You travel in groups. Where’s the rest of your lot?” Kelly looked around – in a sudden anticipation of an attack, that this might just be a lure to draw her out – it’s not like that sort of thing hadn’t happened before.

He didn’t look up when he answered, and his voice was so weak that she had to make a step towards him and lean down to understand him.

“Got ambushed two days ago. Up Koblenz. Fucking werewolves and a group of Krauts been pestering us since Erfurt,” he said. “Stayed behind to deal. To give my… men… a chance to outrun them, get across the Rhine.”

“And you got injured? In the ambush?”

A wince.

“Shot. Rifle.”

Her gaze was drawn back to where his hand rested on his lower abdomen, then back to his downcast face.

“And you escaped them?” she had to ask, incredulous – remembering the extreme pain he seemed to be in, thinking about how this was certainly not a mere graze wound, thinking about how he should have been dead from blood loss ages ago.

“I dealt.”

“Dealt?”

“No need to escape. Killed them all,” he said – entirely monotonous.

“And you couldn’t catch up with your… men?”

“Others got… on my trace again. More werewolves,” he whispered. “Knew they’d concentrate on me… had to move.”

Kelly understood what it meant without him needing to explain. He had utilised himself as bait to divert the werewolf hunting groups from where he knew other groups of his fellow stragglers would try to cross the Rhine – or already had – and head towards the Western Front in a straight line as opposed to follow the course of the Mosel like he had.

Almost all of the British forces she had observed had been located at the upper course of the Kyll, struggling to make the last kilometres to where the Allies had just retaken most of the Ardennes in a massive clash of the German and Allied armies.

“And now you’ve led them here,” she said, frowning. “And they’ve closed in on you. And it is too dangerous for you to cross the bridge.”

“Yes,” he said – it sounded like a very final admittance of defeat.

_ Die Nachtigall _ wavered.

“‘M not gonna make it over that bloody bridge without magic to cover me. Outposts gonna see me and gonna shoot me to pieces. And if I do use magic ‘n make it, a several hordes of fucking werewolves will jump on me before ’m anywhere near... someone... who can pick up what’s left of me. But if I wait… they’ll just sniff me out.”

And then he lifted his head, and despite his voice having become slurred in addition to being dreary and barely audible, the small action changed something about his demeanour - there was a sudden undercurrent of a spark beneath which hadn’t been stamped out yet; a slight streak of… stubbornness.

“So give me back that pistol and let me take my chances or… just… fucking finish it.”

There was a pause.

In hindsight, Kelly had thought that it wasn’t like she could have done anything else, because she had been helpless, standing far away, watching, outside her body, as if she had lost control over her own actions, unable to comprehend why she did what she did – unable to face it – a trickle.

She flipped the pistol in her right hand, took it by the barrel and held out the handle in front of his face.

He didn’t take it at once, which told her that he hadn’t expected it to happen. But then he did, and after putting it back into the folds of his uniform, he tried to stand up.

It was arduous to watch.

Still, Kelly watched, and kept watching, as _ die Nachtigall_, finally up on his feet, made a couple of steps along the pillar, before hovering on the edge of concealing shadow and thicket, not quite making the next stride required to put himself out into the open and to go ahead and climb the slope to get on the Eastern side of the bridge.

But his shoulders had straightened, and when he turned his head and gave a curt nod Kelly was sure that the man was entirely ready to walk into death’s welcoming arms.

A thought flashed across Kelly’s inner eyes – it was the thought of that small goblin girl, and the spark in her eyes, and how that spark would become extinct when _ Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften _ would propagate and glorify the news of Thomas Nightingale’s death.

“_Warte_,” she said, making her way to where he stood, and put a hand on his shoulder – a completely unaware action, and after she realised what she had done, she pulled back her hand as if she had burnt herself with the touch.

She bit the inside of her inner lip, uncertainty spreading throughout her, and from the outside, she screamed at herself that what she was going to offer was nothing but madness.

“As long as I’m next to you, my presence will hide you, your magic. The werewolves - they won’t find you. I could stay – I could stay with you and you could sit them out,” she said.

There was another moment of utter silence in which he slowly turned his head to her to halfway meet her gaze. He blinked twice – once because a drop of water that had beaded on one of his eyelashes, and the second time with disbelief.

“You just thought about killing me.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“So why’d you do it?”

“I thought you’d appreciate the offer,” she said, pointedly raking her eyes over his feeble frame barely holding itself upright against the stone of the bridge pillar – a cool and condescending gesture, contradicting everything she had just offered to do, everything she had done.

“You’d be much safer going back into your river,” he said then, and Kelly had the sudden urge to yell at him that it wasn’t her river, it _ wasn’t_, it was her Mama’s – but she’s dead – because of _ – _

“Risk your life?” he continued. “After everything _ my kind _ did to you?”

Once again, the momentum of his words ripped the sparks of rage from Kelly’s lungs and left her speechless.

She searched for irony in his face, the face of a wizard, _ einem Praktizierenden _, those who forced what was magic to them into slavery with the sound of inhumane screeching in her head - the sort of people, no matter which country, which allegation, which point in time, tried to classify them like a worthless sub-species, tried to press them into Latin-worded categories – Kelly searched for contempt, for false guilt, one of those selfish lies which she so often encountered, flowing over their lips like poisoned honey.

And she found nothing of it.

“I don’t know,” she finally answered, and it was truthful - because she genuinely did not know, except for a whisper of something strange yet something that carried reason with it in the back of her head – that trickle she ignored – wanted to ignore.

He stared at her, and even through the thick layer of exhaustion and indifference weaved around him like a cocoon, Kelly observed flickers of confusion darting over his face, whereupon she added: “Maybe it’s the thing that you don’t belong to the particular bunch of your kind who saluted and screamed _ Heil Hitler _ while they executed my mother,” and Kelly did not know why she had just said that, either - the sentence slipped out of her mouth, a tightly guarded piece of her given away.

A memory surged up before her inner eye, a raging flood, foaming, taking away her ability to breathe, and the moment they did it, the moment it felt like every bone in her body had been broken simultaneously, the moment it felt like they had ripped out her heart, the moment they –

Kelly suppressed it, going back and forth between something split inside her, like a destabilised pendulum. She ignored it like she ignored that trickle, because she knew it would mean confronting the frayed end of that broken connection to her Mama – and she had clamped that connection off long ago out of bare necessity to function.

This time, he didn’t outright flinch, but Kelly noticed his nails carving inwards, over where he had put his right hand on the stone for support.

“All I know… is… that we… have never been… forthcoming,” he breathed, and even though he turned his head away before speaking again, she saw him grimace – and it might have been pain, considering he was putting up a fight to do as much as speak, but much later Kelly thought that it had most probably been shame, because then he whispered:

“We never had – any right… and… if I were you… I… wouldn’t know… whether… not just… kill me.”

Now it was Kelly’s turn to stare again, and then he coughed, only once, and his whole body turned stiff as a result before he slumped back to the ground, on his knees, eyelids shutting, and there was another grimace, his teeth bared and his chin pressed to his chest, holding back a scream –

It was arduous to watch.

And Kelly didn’t.

Just in time did she manage to go down on her knees next to him to keep him from falling back into the sludge completely, putting her arm around his shoulders and arms and drawing him into half of an embrace.

She held him like that, in silence, that trickle in the back of her head growing stronger, harder to ignore – and she held him, trying not to think, watching from outside, but yet thinking, contemplating, inside, until he had stopped shuddering from the new onslaught of spasms, and only afterwards, she murmured:

“I decide that you deserve to live, _ Nachtigall_.”

He made a strange sound in response – it took Kelly a moment until she could place it as something akin to a laugh – a chuckle steeped in self-deprecation and repentance.

It was then that for the first time in their whole interaction, Kelly saw any kind of tangible, gripping emotion appear on his face, even with his eyes still closed, and it was nothing but bleak sorrow – the kind that told you that the soul before you was torn to pieces.

Kelly swallowed – and suddenly she asked herself if it wouldn’t be the kinder thing to do if she were to just take back his pistol and shoot him.

It was obvious that for him, time had been broken, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> der/die Praktizierender/-den = practitioner  
die Römerbrücke = the Roman Bridge  
"Eine Bewegung, und du bist tot" = "One move and you are dead"  
die Nachtigall = the Nightingale  
"Warte" = Wait  
Reichsmark = 1924-1948 German currency, 50.000 equates to approx. 165.000 Euros  
Wehrmacht = 1934-1945 name of the armed forces of the Third Reich, founded in 1921 as Reichswehr
> 
> Arnhem was the main location of Operation Market Garden, a huge airborne offensive of the Allies in September 1944. I headcanon Nightingale having fought there.
> 
> \---
> 
> Hello, I am not dead! I am genuinely so, so sorry for not having uploaded or updated for so long, but be assured, I haven't given up on anything!  
Since March, my year has been absolute bonkers, a lot has happened, my mental health has made a lot of up and downwards curves and I barely found proper time to write. But I have come back into somewhat of a flow right now, and finally decided to post the first chapter of my current project.  
I wanted to write the meeting between Kelly and Nightingale since I read the offhand line of Kelly talking about her cradling the Nightingale in her arms in The October Man, and here it goes.  
I am putting an incredible amount of heart into this right now, and identify a lot with Kelly and what her progress will be throughout the next two chapters, so this story already has a very important and close place in my heart.  
A lot of the remaining stuff is already written, but due to my psyche and time I am not going to make any promises re: updating pace this time. 
> 
> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy and I'd be incredibly glad if you leave some Kudos and/or a comment. And I thank all of you for all the support and comments and love I have already recieved. You are wonderful and keep a gal going.


	2. surviving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> German to English translations and information on the Mosel and its side rivers can be found at the end.  
Please be aware of the updated tags.

It wasn’t like Kelly hadn’t thought of any other possibilities while they sat there in silence, as an early dusk started to spread long-fingered shadows across further ground. 

Before the war, Kelly would have been certain that she could have kept him alive underwater until the werewolves were gone, as many days as it would have taken for them to give up and depart. In fact – resting inside her arms, down in the riverbed, might have bettered his health as a whole. 

Now, she didn’t think it possible that she’d manage it for more than a dozen minutes. 

Although, crossing the bridge was entirely avoidable – swimming and dragging him across the river to the Western side was a task she could still undertake with ease. But most probably, she wouldn’t be able to accompany him for a much longer distance than a kilometre after doing so – any further, and she would have collapsed from loss of strength due to leaving the riverbed behind her; the only vein and source of power – however diminished – still keeping her alive. And not accompanying him and sending him on his way now would mean that either a massive group of werewolves would find him in less than a heartbeat and make easy prey, or that without her constant touch, he’d freeze to death before being anywhere near the Front after being soaked to the skin by the icy waters. Although she might have been able to dry his clothes before she’d sent him on his way, but then again, Kelly wasn’t sure if she was still able to perform even such a simple procedure. 

“What’s your name, then?” the man murmured, out of nowhere and with his eyelids still closed, ripping Kelly out of her deliberations. 

She considered not telling him, but only for a moment. It wasn’t like it could do any harm, and they had already moved far beyond the usual line of introductions.

“You can call me Kelly,” she said. 

“The Kyll, then?”

“Kelly,” she repeated. 

“Fair enough,” he murmured. “I’m Tho –”

“I know your full name, _ Nachtigall_,” she interrupted him. “And I believe most of the European collective does as well.” 

He went quiet at that, and she felt him tense up where he leant against her. 

“We need to move further back into the thicket,” she said. “And I need to take a look at that wound, as long as there’s any daylight left.” 

“Don’t think… you can do… anything about it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, standing up. “And I want to make sure that you aren’t going to scrape off, not on my watch. Would be a waste of my time and effort otherwise.”

He didn’t react to that last stab, and going by his earlier statements, Kelly hadn’t thought he would. 

Helping him stand back up without causing him pain proved as much as impossible, and when she got him lying back down at the most well-sheltered spot she could find, his whole body trembled – not like it had with the force of the earlier aftershocks, but more like a constant tremor of deep-seated exhaustion, every fibre of his muscles struggling to keep moving forward.

After unbuttoning the _Wehrmacht _ greatcoat, she began to loosen the layers of his uniform, down to a shirt made of rough cloth; between her fingertips, it felt more like canvas than proper linen when she drew it up and out of where it was still half-heartedly stuffed into his trousers – but that might have just as well been due to being stiff with big patches of dried blood. A broad, makeshift bandage of ripped cloth had been wrapped around his hips and clumsily fastened with a pin of some sort, and when Kelly tried to remove it, the fibres stuck to his skin. It obviously hadn’t been changed for some time – if it had even been changed once after being applied. 

She tried tugging first. He immediately flinched into a half-upwards position, hissing something she couldn’t understand before sinking back on his shoulders, drawing one ragged breath after the other, a hand clenched into the drawn-up clothes on his chest, knuckles white.

“Alright, I’m going to try something else,” she said. “Don’t move.”

He didn’t answer, again – he only stared up at the dark underside of the bridge. She took it as consent.

Kelly laid her right hand on the spot where a mix of tacky substances had darkened the fabric, trying to barely touch as to not strain the wound any further, and procured some droplets of water out of the ground. They flew up to gather between her fingers before settling to moisten the bandage, and after some more gentler tugging, she was able to peel the fibres away. 

Her eyes flew open and she gasped – purely on impulse. 

“_Verdammte Scheiße_.”

What Kelly had expected had been along the lines of a deeper muscle wound with an additional splintered pelvic bone. Maybe even something more internal, going by the amount of pain he seemed to be in. 

What she certainly _ hadn’t _ expected had been a burn. It was located at his left hip, and at the very least as broad as the palm of her hand – the middle of it a charred black and white, and rimmed with deep red skin and bloody blisters. 

“Burnt the wounds closed,” he breathed.

‘Dealt’ – her arse. She cursed again – only that now she utilised some of her more colourful variants of Middle High German. She did have a tendency to fall back into older versions of her language when stressed.

The plural _also _prompted her to examine him further, and after managing to try and turn him on his right side without causing him another bout of torment doing so, she found an exit wound on the far left of his lower back in the form of an even messier area of scorched-away skin. The burn was so deep that she barely managed to recognize the actual tear that the bullet had produced – a tear now grotesquely melded together by sticky folds of flesh.

At least it provided some sort of explanation as to why he hadn’t bled to death yet. Not that it softened the fact that it was more than just miraculous that he made it that far at all. She remembered him mentioning Koblenz – if he had walked along the course of the Mosel, it would have been over a hundred kilometres he put behind him after being shot.

It should have been impossible to do so, for an ordinary human being, at least. But sure enough, none of the tales had described _die Nachtigall _as being _ordinary_. 

But what Kelly knew for sure was that he was _human_, and that the injuries would kill him if he didn’t get appropriate help, and that they would sooner rather than later. She didn’t need to have a proper medical education to see that the wounds already lingered with infection.

“Doesn’t look good… does it?” he whispered into the silence. 

“I’ve seen worse,” she said, trying to let her voice remain cool. “You’ll live for now, but I need to try and clean those. Think you can keep quiet?”

His answer was groping around with his right hand until he found a piece of wood on the ground to stick between his teeth.

He _did _ keep quiet. But when she was finished with repeatedly going over the burns with small globes of water until she was satisfied at length – the wounds had lost some of the heat radiating off them and did look less irritated around the edges – he had gotten paler, if that was still possible, and spat out the stick with its middle splintered. 

Everything else she could do was to take off her own scarf, which seemed to be the cleanest piece of fabric available to them, soak if with some more cold water gathered up into her hand and fold it around his left hip so it covered the burns. Looking for something to secure it with, she inclined her head to some sort of thin slingbag attached to his uniform.

“You still need that?”

“Not since that bloody forest,” he croaked. 

He got out a knife from an inside pocket and gave it to her to cut it away from his uniform – there was blood sticking to the blade, and for a short moment, Kelly asked herself if it belonged to him or someone else – and she drew the sling around the slim of his hipline to fasten the improvised bandage.

When she made a knot and had no other choice than to put some strain on the injury, he threw up, but there was nothing to emit except a watery mixture of blood and bile that dripped down over his cheek.

So there _ was _ internal damage, and going by the location of the wounds and the direction the bullet must have taken tearing through his body, very probably to his digestive system. It answered Kelly’s question if it would make any sense to risk leaving him alone for just a brief moment to try and find something for him to eat – she didn’t think he’d be able to keep it down. 

She did give him some water out of the palm of her hand, though, and there was a barely audible ‘_Danke_’ forced over his lips before he washed out his mouth and began to drink in very slow sips. He managed one handful, and then sank back into where she had drawn him into her lap, shivering.

By then, it was almost completely dark, and with nothing else to do, Kelly wiped over his face with the hem of her shirt to at least cleanse away the worst of the tracks that sweat, dirt and blood had left on him. It wouldn’t help with anything, but Kelly knew that sometimes, it needed these things to make someone feel more than just a destitute thing wasting away with not even a modicum of dignity left. 

It had been the last thing that Elzie had asked her. To rinse her face with the water of her river, to clean off the blood and acid and poison and whatever the Nazis had forced over her and down her throat before they left her to die – to let her feel her river one last time.

Kelly had dragged her into it, desperate, begging for her to survive, but even being submerged in her own waters had come too late to save her sister. 

She’d been so inquisitive, curious, never tired of what the world offered her and the secrets it might still harbour for her to learn – always so eager to explore –

“They’re closer,” he said, a sudden whisper dredging her back into cruel reality anew. “Can feel them.”

“_Ja_,” she murmured. She couldn’t just feel them – their prowling, heavy paws thudding on the ground, hungry growling, spit running down their chaps and dropping on dead grass – she could smell them approaching; with a scent of stifling decay layering itself over the waters of the Mosel. 

He took the pistol back out of his uniform, gripping it with such tension that his whole arm started to shake.

“The moment you need that we are both most probably done for,” she said. “Better leave it where it was and try to get some rest.”

He didn’t put his weapon away, and she didn’t try to say anything else. 

And then, they waited, while another January night choked Trier into desolate darkness and silence, and with Kelly asking herself once more what the hell she was doing - when just a few hours before, everything she had sought was death. 

\------

When the sun worked up its way anew, throwing bleak streaks of dirty light on where it should have no more right to shine, the werewolves hadn’t found them – they were still dangerously close, and Kelly had thought that she had spotted three about 400 metres down the shore through a small gap in the thicket, but here she was, undetected, still alive, and so was _ die Nachtigall_. 

He had his eyes closed and the shivering had stopped, but there was a concerning sheen of sweat on his eyebrows, and sure enough – when she placed the back of a hand on his forehead, it was unnaturally warm. Not outright burning, but he was clearly running a fever. She couldn’t tell how much of it was due to the immense strain of his situation as opposed to the infected wound, but it forebode nothing good, especially since the presence of the werewolves showed no sign of continuing on their way downstream.

Kelly hadn’t slept – keeping watch and still not having lost all the advantages her status gave her over the needs of the human body. And she knew that the man hadn’t, too. There hadn’t been a moment where his breathing evened out, and every few minutes or so, he’d flinched at the slightest bit of sound or movement of hers. Occasionally, she had to hold him down and put a hand over his mouth when he jolted upwards after his mind had caught up with his body giving in to exhaustion and slipping away into semi-unconsciousness on its own accord, his arms flailing – possibly trying to grasp for a staff that wasn’t there, or maybe something else – another weapon, or the attempt to shake someone awake.

She hadn’t tried to make conversation once. Not only because the hearing and other senses of the werewolves were far more sharpened during the moonlight and it would thus have been foolish to do so – but also because she had seen no use. There had been enough occasions where she’d had to force herself to not just leave him and step back into the waters of the Mosel, asking herself what had struck her during their meeting that she hadn’t shot him, or that she hadn’t just sent him on his way; asking herself, again and again – just _ what _ had kept her from going on her own way to end all of this.

And he certainly wouldn’t be able to give her that single answer, the only one she truly wanted, and she had no desire to exchange anything more personal with a random British _ Praktizierenden_, no matter if he wasn’t just quite like everyone else of his lot, or if he was the infamous _ Nachtigall_.

She had laid bare enough for him to see already. 

But what she did do was to give him a few more handfuls of water to drink, and he even managed to sit up into a slightly more upright position for it without her having to help.

“_Danke_,” he said again after he was finished. 

Somehow, Kelly had to appreciate that he always used German to thank her despite them having mainly conversed in his language – there was something about it that made it more earnest than just a token gesture, or a formality. 

She nodded, shook the remaining drops of water from her fingertips, and proceeded to let her head fall back against the stone of the bridge pillar next to them, staring on a small construct of frost crystals that had amassed on a piece of moss during the night. The air had grown cold enough that it hadn’t melted yet.

His gaze followed her own, she noticed – his grey eyes seeming a bit clearer than the day before, and when he spoke, his voice was a tad firmer as well. 

“I’m sorry for attacking you. I didn’t realise soon enough that you were a river goddess.”

Kelly snorted. 

“I stepped out of a fucking river, wet from hair to toe.”

“Didn’t see it,” he said, but at least he had the dignity to wince at his own stupidity. “I was just trying to get a moment of rest, and then you were there, and I sensed your magic too late –”

“And your first instinct was to topple and shoot an unarmed woman.”

He grimaced, and there was a long pause.

“There is… no excuse,” he said at last, and his head turned away, averting her eyes. “It’s… I am –”

You were incredibly tired, you were panicked, you have walked a few hundred kilometres across enemy land after seeing your comrades slaughtered, you have seen things no living being should ever see, you were in extreme pain, you’ve been acting on survival instinct shaped by six years of endless, gruelling combat. 

Salome would have said all these things. She was the second oldest of them, only younger to Kelly herself, and their Mama. She always opened her arms to everyone, no matter if human, if fey or someone else of the collective, she softened Kelly’s edges away, always gentle, the sweetest heart of them all. Always striving to build community, friendship, peace, even with the Weimar folk. 

She had been the first of them to be lured into a trap, the first to vanish.

They never found out to where, but Kelly knew.

Ettersberg. 

“It’s the war,” she said, her voice cold, and deliberately so. “Shows that all humans are monsters if given the chance, you said so yourself. Why should you be excluded from that?”

He flinched – a pained yet fast suppressed reaction, but it had been there – before turning back to the lifeless, monotone expression she had gotten to know well by now. 

“You are right,” he said. A pause, and he swallowed. “I am.”

Kelly stayed silent at first, because this was going into exactly those dangerous directions she hadn’t wanted to converse about – and because she didn’t have the nerve to hold confessional discussions with him for however long her outside part didn’t manage to convince her to abandon this ridiculous situation.

But then, she sighed, and admitted to him – and to herself: 

“For what it’s worth, _ Nachtigall _ – maybe it’ll help your conscience that being aware of this makes you a refreshing exemption.”

\------

A few more hours of silence passed afterwards, and, in a very ironic change of theme, there inevitably came a point where he had to take a piss – literally.

He informed her of this with obvious and awkward discomfort, and seemed almost comically shocked when she told him that she’d better help him to get the fuck up on his feet to get closer to the surrounding thicket, because she still had some standards – and those included not having someone piss on a patch of grass where they’d still spend an undefined period of time; or a man in her arms who had just wet his trousers, and equally not a man who collapsed due to a bullet wound while taking said piss and making himself reek of even more stench than he already did. And she couldn’t leave his side anyways – Kelly didn’t know what damage even a minute of not touching him would do to the layering effect. It’s not like there were experimental statistics on this sort of stuff and she wasn’t going to take any chances. 

“I’m over a thousand years old,” she said while putting an arm around his chest to steady him. “During the Middle Ages it was a daily thing that men whipped out their cocks on a daylit street and pissed against the walls. I’m used to far worse sights than yours, believe me.”

She was lying – it wasn’t very often that she had seen men with blood in their pee, and there were edges of red tendrils spreading over the fringes of her scarf still covering the burns.

“I’m unsure if this is intended to be a compliment,” he said weakly while tucking himself back in and drawing his upper clothes back over the bandaged wound and waistband of his trousers. 

Even if there was no discernible intention behind his dryly spoken words, she was just about to give him a very blunt and direct answer about the idea that she might want to make him any kind of compliment, nevertheless one about his reproductive organs, but then he swayed with a sudden cramp, and his knees gave out from beyond him. Kelly, unprepared, sank to the ground with him, and she immediately clamped a hand over his mouth before even trying to regain any sort of position.

It was good that she did, because this time, he did not manage to stay quiet. 

The spasms took several minutes to pass, and when they finally did, he went limp and let his eyes fall shut, and didn’t even try to help her when she moved him back into their original hiding spot. After being settled, Kelly rinsed away the blood from where he had bit his lips, mixed with drops of fresh feverish sweat. 

Only when she decided to take a second, closer look at his injuries as to try and draw some more heat out of them did she see the silver object that had halfway slipped out of an inner pocket. On first view, it seemed to be a normal-sized fob watch – it was round, had an intricate gravure on both of its slightly curved sides, and it was about half a centimetre in depth with some sort of opening mechanism on the rim of it. 

And it definitely wasn’t of human possession. 

The moment she had set proper sight on it, an essence came off it in strong waves, sickly sweet and heavy in the air – oddly enough, it reminded her of damp foxglove on early summer mornings. But even before she took it into her right hand, Kelly knew that the smell was of feyish nature. 

Poisonous fury, mixed with a flash of what she later recognised as disappointment, struck her like lightning.

“That belongs to a fey, not you,” she hissed. “Did you steal it?”

He re-opened his eyes, at first disoriented, but then turned his head and saw the object in her hand – he grasped for it immediately, but Kelly snatched his wrist and drew it into a violent lock, only stopping a bare centimetre before a breaking angle. She put her right leg over his stomach simultaneously, pressing her calf down on it only a hand’s breadth away from his wound. 

She had to force herself to not raise her voice when she repeated:

“_Did you steal it? _”

“No,” he gasped, voice pinched with barely suppressed pain. “No, I did fucking not –” 

“Prove it.”

“Open the… damn thing,” he said, wheezing and trying to gain some counterposture to soften the lock she had on his wrist – he failed. “And let… go.”

After a very long moment of consideration while watching him squirm, she conceded – but only his wrist. She kept her leg where it was until she had snapped the locking mechanism open. 

What was revealed was not a watch, but a small photograph clasped into a side each. While the left one showed a bigger group of people, the right depicted a grinning man and a woman. Kelly immediately recognized the man to be the same one as lying before her, even if he had fuller hair, a healthy weight and an entirely different demeanour written all over him. The woman was dressed in a maid’s outfit, had a sharp-edged face, expressive eyes, long black hair hanging over her shoulders like a curtain – and was definitely fey. 

“She’s a… friend,” he said. “She… gave it to me… of her own will. As a charm. For luck… it is… a promise –”

“A fey, as a friend, in your world?” she demanded, because that concept seemed so surreal that she could do nothing else but to reject it. “Giving you a lucky charm?”

“She’s a good friend.”

“Meaning you are using her – for what? Sex?”

Kelly expected faked outrage, but it was the way he grew dead quiet and serious – the way that even the pain seemed to evaporate from his face despite her still tormenting him on the side – what made her believe in his words. 

“No. Never,” he said, his voice as dangerous when he had first attacked and threatened her. “And I’d kill everyone who’d try without hesitation.”

For a moment, she returned the look he gave her, and remembered overhearing that _ Obersturmführer _ quaking in his boots talking about the sight of _ die Nachtigall _, clearing his path through a battlefield – and although she still wasn’t able to pity him, she thought that she might just have gained some ability to imagine where he was coming from. 

She took her leg away from his stomach, to which he reacted with an audible exhale and a shiver going through his body; but Kelly couldn’t bring herself to give him the courtesy of an apology, and he let it pass. 

Instead, she put the charm back inside the marred palm of his hand, expecting him to slip it back into a secure pocket of his uniform the very same moment, and there was a small movement of his thumb indicating exactly that – only for him to draw it back and leave it opened, looking at the photographs.

The right one of him and the fey woman seemed to be more recent; the left was heavily yellowed and worn away at the edges.

“My family. Taken in nineteen-five,” he said, and Kelly moved her face a little closer to take a better look – it was a group of eight in a two-row line up, everything very stiff and official and the faces adequately unhappy, just the way it should be for a proper commissioned family portrait. Going by their clothing, his family had to be lower upper-class at the very least – even the youngest child, a boy, had been formally dressed in what had to be tailored clothing. 

“That’s mother and father,” he said, pointing at the two adults standing in the middle of the second row. His parents had been of approximately the same height, and while his father, a round-faced but otherwise stern-looking man, sported lighter hair already receding at the edges, his mother had smart eyes, a beautiful pinned-up hairdo made of what had to be brown curls and was the only one who had something comparable to a smile forming on her lips – it was oddly captivating, and after Kelly had noticed, she was barely able to move her eyes away. 

“To father’s left is my oldest brother, Joseph. Was born in eighty-eight, studied and became a lawyer – father rarely talked about him, he seemed to be in a constant state of fury about the whole affair. But then again, he always seems to be in a constant state of fury,” he added, frowning at something Kelly didn’t know. “In any way, I rarely saw him at home after he left. He fell in the great war, battle of the Somme. No children,” and his voice quietened after that. 

He continued talking to her about his two other brothers, twins – one had broken his neck after falling from horseback when he was a teen; the other, who got introduced to her not by name but as an ‘arrogant and bigoted swine’, had gone to marry some noblewoman, but apparently his two children were very endearing, and it appeared that he was set to inherit most of their father’s fortune – if he ever turned out to be alive still. He’d gone missing in action in December – the Ardennes. 

“I wanted to participate in a mission into the region where he had last been accounted for and try to find a trace, but I wasn’t allowed,” he murmured. 

Kelly knew he was babbling, and even if she wasn’t particularly interested, she let him. There was the next fresh line of sweat beading across his forehead and the hand in which he held the charm had started trembling. Keeping him talking and his attention diverted from the wound and everything else seemed like a good enough idea, and it’s not like they could do much else. She hadn’t spotted another werewolf, and the regular patrols of soldiers she was aware of should have long passed, so they ought to be fine as long as they kept their voices down to murmur and stayed hidden.

“That’s Mabel,” he said, pointing at the girl next to his mother. “Three years younger than Joseph. Met a rich American selling cars at a soirée we visited on a trip to Paris in nineteen-seven, married one year later, has three children, and rarely comes back home nowadays. Cannot blame her. But when she still did back during the Tens and Twenties, her husband always brought the particular sort of elegant and fast cars with him and tended to take us younger children on tours. He taught me and Alice how to drive – entirely in secret, of course,” he added, and moved the tip of a dirt-rimmed nail to a much younger girl in the first row – Kelly would have pegged her as six or seven years at the point the photo had been taken. 

“Alice. She has become a journalist. Filed for divorce five years ago after she found out her husband had belied her for most of her pregnancy. Moved out and now lives with her daughter in a London flat.”

“Can’t imagine that this had been easy,” Kelly said. “But good for her that she went through with it.”

“He is an arse,” he said, eyes crinkling with a sudden spark of anger. “Although I hadn’t wished for it, I had thought something like that might happen. I am glad she rid herself of him. But of course father was on the edge, tried to talk her into staying with him – even before, he treated Alice and myself as if we had spent our lives doing nothing of worth except bringing unimaginable disgrace over his name. And mother had died in thirty-nine, shortly before the invasion of Poland, and ever since, he’s been next to insufferable – as if he’d been the only one mourning her loss,” he said, and for a second, his voice caught in his throat, and there was a pause.

“But Alice… I visit her whenever I can. She is bold, the strongest of us six, the bravest – always has been.”

“A disgrace?”

“She isn’t,” he said at once, and with his voice hardened. “It’s the usual narrow-minded ingredients. Female journalist, pregnant aged forty-two and then becoming divorced –”

“I got that. I meant you. What’s the deal?”

“Oh,” he said, and there was another, albeit much longer pause, before he murmured: “I guess it’s the magic. Father… he has never been particularly affine to the whole concept.” Kelly didn’t need to enquire further to discern that the answer was only one reason of many, even if probably one that carried much of the weight. 

He moved his nail to the smallest of the children, one hand clasped with those of Alice. Going back and forth between the man on the right-hand picture and the woman who was his mother made it obvious that he had inherited most of her prominent features – from the form of his face and his complexion to the colour of his hair. 

“I was the youngest.” Equating expendable, he didn’t say – at least when his three brothers had still been alive. 

“I can see that, too,” she said, sighing and shifting her head back against the stone wall – the crystal was still there, and she returned to stare at it as opposed to the photograph. “I was thinking about something more specific, since you just spent an exorbitant amount of your breath giving me, a foreign river spirit, a run-through of your family history. You have a spouse? Children?”

“Actually, this is something specific,” he said, avoiding. “Me being the youngest, that is.”

Kelly frowned, and had to ask. “And why’s that?”

“The whole affair of my birth,” he said. “My family, including the extended parts, have always made sure on slightest prompt that I knew mother had nearly died. Apparently, I came early, and it had been a long and strenuous labour. I know father blamed me that I was the reason they never had any more children afterwards.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Kelly snorted. 

“He never said it directly to my face,” he said. “But it was the way he behaved around me… right from the moment I can remember. Him, avoiding me. Him, always fighting about me with mother, being happy to send me away for school, despite the magic,” and then he snorted as well. “You are right – it was ridiculous. They couldn’t even agree on the date of my birthday.”

“Stop fucking around with me,” she said, annoyance creeping into her voice. 

“I’m speaking the truth,” he said, and when she looked back down on his face out of the corner of her eyes, that small but impertinent spark had seemed to flicker back up inside his gaze. “The doctors were fighting for the life of my mother, and when they had me delivered and her stabilised, nobody had thought to look at the clock, or paid attention to the beginning of New Year’s Celebrations. And nobody knew if it had still been eighteen-ninety-nine or nineteen-hundred. My father voted for the first, my mother for the latter.”

Kelly didn’t even try to think about the bloody chances, but she resigned herself to believe him, again – it wasn’t like he had a reason to lie about the whole of it, and what he told her just seemed right for whatever small-minded things she expected of human behaviour. “And who won?” 

“Mother, of course,” he said; and there was a sudden flash of a grin on his face, like a magnified version of that impertinent spark from before – it vanished as fast as it had sprung alight. 

“She always won. She had that mix of… intelligence, and quick wits, and she was so stubborn, and… she loved, and supported us all, no matter the paths each of us set on… she held the family together, she brought out the best in everyone – the best in father… in me…”

He trailed off, and Kelly suddenly realised – far too late – that she had just caught herself with the corners of her mouth tugging upwards into a smile. 

It almost choked her – that moment of strange familiarity they had just shared, so far away from all that death, bursting like a bubble struck by the sudden dagger of pain stabbed through her heart. It came back as strong as it had yesterday, completely catching her off-guard – because she hadn’t smiled because of him, or maybe she had, maybe there had been this flicker of empathy, rebounding into herself like a spiral spring, because there was her Mama before her inner eye, laughing, and how she could have said the same about her Mama – how this could have been her exact words, and only a second later did she catch herself whispering it out aloud – she couldn’t have stopped herself even if she’d tried. 

And suddenly she sat there, and _ die Nachtigall _ had grown quiet, listening to her telling him about her Mama, and about her younger sisters – Salome and Elzie, and Liesel and Alfie, and even the insufferable Ursa – Kelly had never been able to stand her and all her arrogance surrounding her status as a partial border river. Then there were her French sisters, and she continued gossiping about the twins, Madon and Meurthe, and at that point she had already talked far longer than he had – and then there was the youngest of all of the Mosel sisters, Lotte – 

“Her river had been without soul for centuries – we’ve been so happy, and... she was only five when they got her,” she said, her voice breaking – she was still staring at those crystals, and then, they melted away under her gaze, unwanted – and a small drop of water slipped down the stones before being soaked up by the already wet earth, but it still took and took, that black hole, proceeded swallowing up all it could get into its voracious abyss. 

A solemn echo came to her mind, the combined voices of countless pastors she’d heard reciting the same verse, standing at the graves of an endless row of human friends – many with names she’d long buried and forgotten. 

_ Erde zu Erde, Asche zu Asche, Staub zu Staub. _

A warm hand touched her right – he had surprisingly calloused fingertips – and before she could follow instinct and recoil, he whispered:

“I am so – so very sorry.”

From everybody else – everyone, but especially _ einem Praktizierenden _ – Kelly would have taken offense at any sort of apology, at the sheer audacity to try and make it better, because no one – _ no one _ could. 

But when she turned to look at his face in full, saw the deep lines of sudden, tangible emotion – that raw, broken sorrow – return; and with it his words – _ ‘After everything my kind did to you?’ _ – and how he viewed himself as a monster, how _ she _ viewed him as a monster, all of them, but right now, after he had just talked about his family, and siblings, and his damned birthday, and that fey friend giving him a lucky charm, and listening to all what she’d said after they’d known each other for less than a day – something told her that, with all of the brutal honesty he’d displayed – that he understood. 

“Surviving… it had been… fine,” it burst out of her, suddenly feeling as if someone had turned that dagger around and had her insides carved out of her – pain had once again left nothing else than an empty, hollow space. “I thought I could move on with time forever – the humans were fleeting, but at least, my sisters were there… and Mama. But it doesn’t work anymore when… things like these happen.”

His eyes had grown glazed and distant, as if he could stare down all her thousand years, and yet see the cogwheels of time breaking apart in front of him.

“And now,” she whispered, “surviving… it has become nothing but a curse.”

And Kelly was so deeply tired of that curse.

\------

It was at some undefined point in the afternoon that the man couldn’t hold on any longer and had to give in: He fell asleep, the charm still opened inside the palm of his right hand and with his thumb resting on the delicate hinges. Rain had started to fall, and the air had returned to a particular sort of clammy humidity mixed with cold – even Kelly could feel the change of conditions through the blanket of warmth the Mosel provided for her. 

Kelly knew for sure that he was down under well and proper this time, because when she gently moved his thumb aside to be able to take the charm into her hands and close it – the moisture would be death for the photographs, and somehow, she’d hate to see them ruined – he didn’t do as much as stir. 

Only then did she see a small corner sticking out from under the photograph of him and the fey girl. 

Of course Kelly had to look.

It was a folded piece of paper – it could barely be called a photograph, as it had clearly been processed at home, and not developed by a professional. And when she opened it, she realised why. 

Two men, laughing, intertwined in a dance position, their hips pressed together in a suggestive fashion – Kelly immediately recognised it as a Tango.

It could have been a good friend, she supposed; they could have been drunk, merely having some fun. But she had been on this earth long enough to know that you didn’t keep a photograph as incriminating as this on your body – during war, hidden beneath another photograph, inside a lucky charm – if it didn’t have some deeper meaning. 

_ So he knows the fear of being found out and caught_, she thought, while folding the photo back together and putting it back inside the charm.

It wasn’t like that particular sort of prosecution was exclusive to the doctrine of the Nazis alone. 

Maybe he wouldn’t end up in a death camp in Great Britain, but Kelly was convinced that if the Allied liberators would fall prone to publicly agree with just one single argument of the Nazis, it would most likely be that queer people were a worthless part of the population better off behind bars – or dead.

For a moment she asked herself if there was any way he knew – but how could he not?

The Red Army had liberated a death camp at Majdanek half a year ago, and what, or more specifically who had been found there wasn’t a secret anymore – at least not to those who didn’t turn a blind eye.

And he’d been there, at Buchenwald. He’d seen. And not just what his kind had done to the likes of her. But also what the humans, non-magical as well as magical, had done to the likes of him.

Another sub-category, labeled foul and despicable, that had to be eradicated to cleanse the greatness of the Aryan – the _ human _ – race. 

_ Of course he knew_, she thought, and slipped the charm back into the inside pocket it had originally fallen out of – she was very careful with fastening the buttons closed so it was tucked away tight and secure.

\------

“What did you achieve by going to Ettersberg?”

The question had sat and festered inside her ever since she had heard the rumours, and although Kelly had already been confident about the true intentions of the British – power – and although she had never had any desire to try and understand their actual reasoning behind going to that horrid forest on a hill in Thuringia to send their own people into a slaughterhouse, it had still been a nagging thought in the back of her mind. 

And it had only grown ever since she had _ die Nachtigall _ lying inside her lap, a legendary soldier told to be near invincible – and yet, even he had gotten his wings clipped and burned by that place and everything that had followed. 

It had been dark when he had woken back up, and even if that had to have been his first hours of somewhat prolonged sleep since days, if not a week, he didn’t give the impression of being more rested. On the contrary; he had gone to being sickly white, and the trembling had grown worse. His eyelids fluttered open and closed several times and weren’t able to stay fixed until she brought the back of her hand to his brows – he gave a strangled sigh, and she couldn’t define if it had been one of relief or pain at the coolness of her skin against his own burning with heat.

He wouldn’t appreciate her asking, Kelly was sure. But suddenly, there was an irritated urge inside her, a desire that she had to know – that they, the magical community of Germany, who had suffered the worst of that place – that they had a _ right _ to know. 

After she had asked, a very long silence followed in which she had to hold herself back as to not repeat her question, all while dreading to speak the name out loud again. At some point, Kelly was convinced that he would not answer her, or hadn’t heard at all – but then his lips started to move, and his next exhale carried only one whispered word out into the cold January air. 

“Nothing.”

“Then what did you want to achieve? You must have had a goal, must have seen some sort of gain –”

“Nothing,” he breathed. “It was good for absolutely nothing.”

“Then why? Why come at all? Why not try to free someone, to get out the prisoners, if it was for nothing? You could have helped someone, you could have –,” she said, and stopped herself to rein in her voice – it had started to shake with roiling anger bubbling up her throat; with bitterness; desperation, even.

The lines of sorrow returned on his face.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “There was nothing to be found but death.”

“Do you even hear me? I don’t care what you’ve found, because I _ know _ – I don’t care who you’ve lost, I want to know _ why _ –”

“Command sent us to recover the records of the research. We succeeded,” he said, and in that moment, his voice had cleared – as well as his eyes, now burning into hers with such an unexpected hostility that her shoulders flinched.

“They sent all of us into a suicide run, just to get there first, for nothing, _ nothing_, and those fucking experiments – what we found – what had been done –”

He stopped then, grasping for words to describe the indescribable, grasping for breath, grasping to keep his countenance.

Kelly had expected something like it. Greed. Hunger for knowledge. She should have known, no, she _ had _ known. And yet, the only thing she felt for a moment was shock – not even anger; just shock – that they would try to come for the results of the experiments. Not to destroy them, to get them out of the possession of the Nazis. But to salvage it for themselves – the knowledge gained from the suffering and horrors of thousands of magical beings. 

It made her sick, speechless. And going by the fury of his eyes, and how he stuttered on each of his words, it was the very same for him. 

“They picked us apart, just as it could have been expected,” he croaked, not continuing the sentence he’d begun. “They came for every single one of us, and I tried – I tried – I had to hope, I held on to the hope that I could do enough, but –”

“Hope?” Kelly scoffed, trying to suppress a sudden burst of embittered laughter. “_Hope_? Are you serious?” 

He stared at her, those grey eyes still burning.

Shaking her head, she turned away from him. “Look at you. Look at us. At everything. Hope, huh? That’s what hope has brought your folk, brought mine. If you still believe in hope,” she spat, “then you are nothing but a damned idiot.” 

There was a pause, and then she felt all the muscles in his back turn rigid. 

“If I don’t believe that there is hope left, then what use was all of this? _ All _ of this? All of those people dying and suffering, _ all those fucking people_,” and he gasped for air before continuing, and oh, how his voice shook with gruesome anguish on the next syllables – “ _ my men_, dying at my side. The whole bloody, godforsaken, _ fucking _ war? If it wasn’t for hope, for a way to make things better, then… _ what was it all for if not for that _? If it wasn’t for hanging on to hope despite – because of everything – what was it all for?” 

His voice caught in his throat, and there was something repressed which sounded like a sob, but he whispered it one last time nonetheless. 

“Tell me, what was it all for?”

Silence fell like a thick blanket wrapping itself around the both of them, drawing closer into a stifling tightness with his words etching themselves into her mind, those words about hope, of all things – the irony that _ die Nachtigall _ talked about hope, to her, and the misery that had clung to his words was like dust clogging up her airways. 

The desperation for hope. 

“Then why do you still believe? If it was for nothing?” she murmured, far, far later, and she didn’t get an answer – it wasn’t like she had expected one, anyways. 

In the darkness of the night, the lightlessness that life had become, Kelly had been asking that question herself as much as him.

Because how could you still believe when time had been broken? 

\------

The dawn of the next day could hardly be called a dawn, as it greeted them with a dense layer of grey and dirty clouds hanging deep, the backbone of the sky arching with the heaviness of the next shower of icy January rainfall. It resisted any ray of light that might have tried to fight its way through. And the twilight persisted throughout the day, clinging to Trier like a recent veil of bombing smoke – not even during what Kelly approximated as midday did it brighten up for just one damned moment.

The werewolves thrived in that kind of weather, and sure enough did Kelly find their presence to be strengthening with every passing hour. Repeated surges of howling echoed in the not so far distance, and at one point she might have heard a shrill, drawn-out scream – one heartbeat, she’d closed her eyes, begging for it to be merely her imagination repeating those many cries she’d already been forced to witness, but when even _ die Nachtigall_, who had turned into a quivering, yet close to apathetic shape in her arms, winced at it, she knew it was real.

Kelly kept her eyes closed until the screams had stopped. 

She could do nothing, she told herself. Nothing but to keep them away from their position with her presence, her glamour seducing them to not look – keep the noose around their necks, no, his neck, slack for just a little bit longer.

The infection had become a lot worse. Kelly had removed her scarf from his hip once again that morning to clean the wounds, and even though she’d done the procedure with all the care and gentleness she’d been able to possibly muster, she had witnessed with every small touch in how much agony he’d been in. Grimacing, quivering, his hands clawing into grass and tormented whimpers escaping his throat – the stunted remnants of yet another set of screams held back against yet another stick between his teeth. 

She had demanded of herself to continue, knowing that she was helping, but her hands had been trembling once she drew back the clothes over the re-fixed bandage, and they hadn’t stopped when she had to force several handfuls of water down his throat until he had been able to keep it down between returning spasms. 

There was no denying that his body was eating itself up from the inside, and Kelly felt damned helpless faced with the whole of it. All of her family she’d lost in simple moments, unable to prevent it once she had realised it was happening. This, she felt, was unnecessary, prolonged, should be avertible – she should be able to do… _ something_. To not let him waste away like this.

But she could do nothing but wait, or at least that was what she told herself. 

She didn’t care. There was nothing keeping her from leaving him alone and to his fate. It wasn’t her responsibility. 

It wasn’t.

However, her gaze wandered back down to his face once more, gaunt and grey save for patches of raw skin flushed with fever and sweat, or those bruises slowly changing colour, and continuing to draw breath after breath after breath over his cracked lips – no matter the struggle.

Bringing two of her fingers to the side of his neck, Kelly checked for his pulse; he had fallen back into a state of exhausted semi-unconsciousness almost immediately after she had made him drink, and hadn’t shown a sign of being awake since.

It was racing, a fast and shallow thrum which definitely wasn’t a good sign – however, it was the fact that he didn’t even do as much as wince at her direct touch which prompted her to try and rouse him.

“Hey, do you hear me?” she said, laying a hand on his right shoulder and letting some pressure find its way into her grip.

Nothing.

She raised her voice as much as she dared, and the grip turned into a soft shake. “_Nachtigall_?”

Kelly had lingered on her next draw of air for far longer than she’d ever feel comfortable to admit, but then, he blinked, and his lips twitched ever so slightly.

It took her a moment until she realised that he tried to talk, and she had to bring her ear next to his face to understand.

“Please… stop.”

She frowned. “Stopping what?”

“The name,” he whispered. At first, she couldn’t follow, and continued frowning while she watched him struggle to form another word.

“...alienating.”

“You know,” she said, “most I know use that name out of veneration for you, not to antagonize.”

“Make them stop,” he whispered.

“You are a legend to many. Saying that name, it gives them…” Kelly struggled for the word – it stuck in her throat like a rusted nail, and speaking it hurt. “It gives them hope. I will not take it away.”

There was a long, dragging pause, and then he croaked:

“You… saw me… now. Person, not…”

And then, Kelly realised, because she _ knew_.

A legend. Something more of a person. 

But through that, also less of a person. 

Less of an individual being, someone who had to live up to an ideal to fulfil its purpose because he had other people who looked up to him for guidance, people who judged him based on that legend without ever having talked to him, making him less of someone who could feel and express like someone normal – someone not just constantly putting up a facade to aspire to something others thrusted upon him. 

Something sank inside her, like a stone splintering through the surface of a layer of packed ice, because she knew, and she hated it, and she realised that she had done the same to him.

“Alright, then. I understand,” she said, breaking the silence. “What do you want me to call you? Is Nightingale better?”

It took a long moment, only for him to shake his head with a scarcely visible movement.

“It… be… nice,” he whispered, eyes half shut and staring at a point far beyond her reach, “... just… being… Thomas.”

“Fair enough,” she murmured, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

“Don’t deserve it,” he whispered. “…failed… failed… them.” 

“Failed who?” she asked, and her voice had softened – entirely by itself. 

“Everyone. Everyone. Too many… dead… couldn’t save… them,” he said, and his eyelids fluttered halfway open. “Too… many… dead,” he repeated, his voice breaking. “My men… my people...that camp… all those… beings… dead. Lost.”

He stopped, and at first, Kelly was paralysed – did not know how to react. She had intended to turn her head away and stay silent, as she did so often, because how could she console him? 

Was there even a way she could?

Did she even want to?

And then she felt that all too familiar trickle she ignored, or maybe didn’t ignore that much anymore; and the trickle carried the memory of his calloused fingertips on the back of her hand.

Kelly bit the underside of her lower lip, and it tugged somewhere entirely else inside her in response – and then, she sighed and said:

“You didn’t fail – you survived. You… protected your men on the way home, you got shot for it. You… you need to remember that you are not one of the dead yet. You need to come home – remember?”

He stared up at her, those half-opened eyes dull and unmoving.

“Your sister, right? Alice,” she said. “And your fey friend. The black-haired one, the one who gave you the charm.” 

“Molly,” he croaked, out of nowhere.

“Yes, Molly,” she answered, her voice gentle.

And then, he said something else, unprompted – another name.

“David,” he whispered, and his eyebrows moved, and there was something about how his lips shifted – suddenly, he appeared with an emotion she thought impossible of a face like his, a face that was painted with the marks of destruction and tragedy – it became tender, and his eyes were filled with sudden longing. 

She knew at once that it was the man from the photograph – the one with whom he’d shared that dance, and Kelly’s insides, that empty hollow, started to ache.

“If for anything – anyone – he needs me,” he said, and in that single moment, his voice was back as clear as her headwaters in spring, filled with straightforward intention. “If I – no. I _ need _ to get back. I cannot fail them again. I need to get back for everyone who’s still there.”

I need to get back to give him hope, to give _ them _ hope – he didn’t say. I am the Nightingale, after all, he didn’t say – mere moments after he had asked to just be Thomas, an ordinary, human man, allowed to be shown that his wings were not just clipped, not just burned, but broken altogether. 

_ What was it all for if not for that? _

Kelly hadn’t answered, and didn’t answer now, because she didn’t know what it had all been for, because she didn’t know anything about hope, and because – just like with the others finding strength in a name – she didn’t want to take that thread he clung to away before it would inevitably snap by itself.

It didn’t start to rain, and it didn’t clear up. Instead, when evening approached, the temperatures sunk again, the ground froze, and small, puffy snowflakes started to make their way down to cover the dead grey and brown of the Mosel’s shores in a layer of innocent white.

They both watched them, the flakes, skipping their way to the earth like angel's feathers, in silence, until he whispered:

“It’s beautiful.”

And Thomas was right, because it was – and once she was able to realise, it was breathtakingly so. 

It had been so long since she had found the ability to appreciate the beauty and peace that nature gave her, and Kelly had been parched of it, blinded to it, and something had happened that had re-opened her eyes to something that had outlived all the death and destruction. 

Something made her _ see _, and it was like the surviving remnants of birdsong in a world gone barren and cold.

Breathtakingly beautiful. 

\------

The following night, he dreamt.

Kelly knew that it was a nightmare from the moment he’d begun twitching at random, whispering feverish strings of words, hardly comprehensible and yet with a desperate air of urgency sticking to them; and when she had tried to shake him back awake and failed to do so, she put a hand back over his mouth out of worry that he might start screaming. 

He didn’t.

Instead, he suddenly warped out of her grasp and into an upright position and threw a fucking fireball into the underside of the bridge.

She had gasped the moment she had felt the echo precedenting his use of a spell, emitting a strangled _ ‘Nein’ _, but it had been too late for her to do anything – his magic had built itself together with the speed of a bird spreading its wings and leaping into a nosedive down the length of a cliff. 

The impact must have been loud, because even through the onslaught of his powerful magic on her mind, she could hear the noise of stone bursting away.

And the howling of the werewolves that accompanied it was even louder. 

Kelly’s eyes were still blinded by the white flash of sizzling heat, but she threw herself on top of Thomas regardless, pressing him onto the flat of his back underneath her, and now prepared to stop any new attempt at magic. He struggled against her, and even if it were the case and he wasn’t simply delirious any longer but had regained full consciousness, she didn’t let him move a centimetre and kept him in place with all her strength and one of her hands clamped over his mouth.

During the past days, the weight of the paws thudding on the ground had mostly been all over the place. But this time, Kelly could feel them reverberating with intention, with a long-desired prey to hunt down in sight. 

They grew closer, and closer, and they’d find them, and Kelly, her insides roiling with a rushing flood making her unable to think, did the only thing that the trickle dictated her to do. 

She closed her eyes, and there was another howl, deafening enough that a stab of pain shot through her ears and into her brain.

The thudding stopped.

_ There is nothing here, _ she thought_. You saw nothing. You felt nothing. There was no magic. You can go away. _

The shuffling of snouts between grass. Growling. Branches cracking as they snapped under the weight of massive claws the size of her hand. 

The rumble of vehicles and screeching of massive tires. Militaristic and urgent orders thrown around. The stench of human-made magic.

_ Hilf mir, Mama_, she whispered without sound, only her lips moving against where she pressed her face against Thomas’s head. 

_ Hier ist nichts. Ihr habt nichts gesehen. Ihr habt nichts gespürt. Ihr könnt gehen. _

Another thud as an enormous paw landed what had to be less than a metre next to her. 

Kelly held her breath.

_ Geh, _ she ordered with her mind. _ Hier ist nichts. _

The werewolf didn’t do as much as shift, and instead, another joined, and stopped moving right next to them, sniffing, pawing at the earth – and then giving another ear-shattering howl ripping through the fabric of the night.

“_Unter der Brücke_,” yelled a male voice, and she heard the all-too familiar noise of rifles being loaded and the oddly prominent scratch of a staff being drawn out of rough linen fabric. 

_ Mama, bitte, _ she mouthed. _ Bitte, hilf mir. _

Kelly blocked out all else until the only thing she truly perceived was the rush of the Mosel, not as much in reality as just in the back of her mind, becoming one with that trickle having taken over her actions. 

_ Geht. Hier ist nichts. _

_ Geht. Ihr habt nichts gesehen. _

_ Geht. Ihr habt nichts gespürt. _

A heartbeat against her body, and a heartbeat in her own chest.

_ Geht. _

The rush in the back of her mind, growing calmer, more directed.

_ Geht. _

Kelly let go, let herself being submerged by it, the trickle, the rush of her Mama. 

_ “Geht,” _she said, and this time, the goddess of the Kyll spoke out loud.

\------

Kelly didn’t know how long it took for all the werewolves and soldiers and _ Praktizierenden _ to leave the immediate area of the bridge and their hiding place. It was still dark, but it had to have been hours, and she didn’t leave her protective position on Thomas for a few more. 

But when she did, resurfaced, she shook like a fish on dry land, and couldn’t get it under control – she only was able to steady herself when she crawled back to Thomas’s side and took him back into her arms, rested the weight of his body against her own. 

He was as white as marble, and not moving as if frozen with shock and fear. She only knew that he was awake because he stared at her with his eyes wide, and the occasional shallow gasp for air when he couldn’t hold it any longer.

“You can breathe again, it’s alright, they are gone, it’s alright” she whispered, again and again, to him just as much as to herself; only to cut herself off when she realised that she couldn’t stop her voice from shaking, either.

She hadn’t fled and saved herself.

She hadn’t given up and let them kill herself. 

Why, she didn’t know, as much as she couldn’t explain what had happened that she had been able to keep them away, the werewolves standing right next to them, the soldiers, _ die Praktizierenden _ who had proven too resistant and aware of their glamour that not even her Mama had been able to influence the most experienced of them when they captured her.

But Kelly didn’t feel powerful. She felt confused, weak, helpless, utterly lost – a plaything in the waves left broken by time. 

Everything seemed to twist away from her, and she didn’t know why.

She didn’t know anything anymore. 

Her Mama would have had the answers to her questions, would have given her guidance, but she was gone, and that construct keeping her upright, those broken bones – they had ceased to stick together, they were crumbling, and the trickle had become unable to ignore. 

And it took Kelly all of her willpower she didn’t know she had still left to drag herself out of the current and onto the shore, and some detached part of herself, the one standing on the outside, forced her to stagger back up on her feet and to follow a row of rational orders to not just keep laying in the mud, to not just drown when the flood would come back and destroy her. 

She took a deep breath and looked around, trying to take in their situation. Most of the thicket around them had been trampled down, and they had been left behind barely shielded by anything else than the stone pillar of the _ Römerbrücke _ next to them; its shadow being the only thing protecting them against the revealing white of the snow. 

There was a spot with two bushes left, though, and Kelly got on her knees and dragged both of them there – as good as she could manage with her body still trembling and all of her strength drained away.

If she caused him pain while doing so, he didn’t respond to it. In truth, he didn’t seem to react to as much as anything anymore, not even when she had them back settled in their usual positions and with her trying to pour some more water down his throat – he just stared into the distance, eyes half closed.

It took her rough shaking and repeating his name for over at least a minute before he blinked and his dilated pupils sluggishly moved around to fix on her leveled gaze. 

“They got me… once… for two days,” he whispered, suddenly. “I am… never going back.” 

This time, there was no explanation needed for Kelly to precisely know what he was talking about.

Liesel had gotten away, one time, before being re-captured. And there had been enough of the German collective who’d been imprisoned on false claims to be tortured and killed, or spat out again only to be left for dead after what they had experienced. 

Humiliation, beatings and electroshocks had merely been starting routine. Then they were experimented on, with drugs, with horrifying spells, or subjected to magic only designed to create endless agony, or those to control and rip information out of their minds when they didn’t cooperate, and then, to finish them off, spells to harvest their life energy. 

And _ Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften _ wouldn’t have been nicer to any of their own folk stepping out of line, and never with one of the enemy – especially when the particular prisoner in question was _ die Nachtigall. _

“If they find us again, if I – can’t get out – if they –,” he said, visibly dragging every syllable out of his body, “promise that you’ll kill me.” 

“No,” she said, immediately. “You cannot possibly ask –”

“Please.”

“I protected you.” Kelly turned her face away from his. “I just kept you alive for two days, and now you want me to kill you?” 

_ And hadn’t I not wanted to kill you two days ago? And hadn’t I not constantly debated myself to leave you alone for those two days? _

“Please. Please,” he repeated, and one of his hands fumbled for the fabric of her old, green shirt, and then clutched it like a lifeline, knuckles white –

“_Bitte_.” 

_ What about needing to get home_, she’d wanted to ask him next, but with a pang, Kelly realised that he was actually _ begging _ her to fulfil his wish.

Her throat went dry, and when she finally looked back down to where she cradled his head in her lap, and met his eyes, they were wide and open and full of unspoken horror.

Kelly had to force herself not to avoid his gaze, not like she did with Liesel – and it felt like suffocating on sand being crammed into her mouth, when she managed, managed to do it now, but not when one of her own sisters had asked for it –

“_Ich verspreche es,_” she answered. 

And Kelly had intended to mean it, with all her heart, because it could be nothing else but her heart that ached like that, ached for the memory of Liesel, ached for whatever the man had had to endure.

But then she realised that she didn’t just want him to live for the sake of it – for the sake of spiting the Nazis, for the sake of the symbol he represented, for the sake of something she couldn’t explain, something that had cemented itself into her head when she had been on her way to find death, when she had talked with him during the last days, when he had spoken about hope, and when she had shielded him last night –

For the first time since she had been left alone, since time had been broken, Kelly found that she _ cared_.

\------

The next day though, Kelly was certain that she wouldn’t have to fulfil her promise anyways – because it wouldn’t matter. The werewolves could find them. _ Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften _ could take him prisoner. But it wouldn’t matter anymore, because Kelly knew that _ die Nachtigall _ was going to die. 

She knew, because he didn’t react when she splashed water over his cheeks and shook his shoulder, and didn’t react when she poked at the red and swollen area around the burns or the burns itself – only when she put pressure on the actual location of the bullet tear did he do as much as twitch, but his eyes stayed shut, and his body sucked empty of life. Even the trembling had stopped.

Only once did he rip his eyes open, and they were far away, covered with a milky haze, and he was wildly sucking for breath, abject terror written into every line that marked his face, and then his lips moved – and then they moved again – but there was no sound. 

Kelly spoke to him, then; cradled him in her embrace, and told him about century-old tales of Trier and the Mosel; about stories of family and love; told him about the happiness and joy of autumn’s wine harvests, about the warm and lush summer days engulfing the _ Kyllbachtal_, forming it into a crib of safety and protection; hoping that, wherever he was, it might re-paint what he was seeing into something a little bit more gentle, a little bit more bearable. 

But she didn’t have any delusions.

He was going to die today, maybe in a few hours, or just a few minutes.

And he was suffering through every single fucking second of it, every moment his heart made an unlikely new beat, every moment his breath didn’t turn cold.

Kelly couldn’t remember when exactly she had taken his pistol into her hands.

She could only remember her damned helplessness, her inability to do _ something_, and that trickle in the back of her head which wasn’t a trickle anymore but a stream, threatening to break the dam she had imprisoned herself in to exist, to keep functioning, despite the hurt and grief that had slipped back into that carved out, drained away space three days ago with too much ease, and the ache, the _ fucking _ ache, and why it couldn’t just stop, why he had forced her back into feeling all of this when all she had wanted was to find death, and why she hadn’t listened to that part outside of her screaming at her to leave him alone. 

Kelly checked the barrel, and found two bullets left inside.

She closed it.

She put one finger on the trigger, and then two – her fingers were small and delicate enough to do so. 

His words resounded in her head.

_ Do me a favour and do it now. _

She leveled the pistol with his forehead, contemplated – then she put the iron opening of the barrel right on his skin. 

He wasn’t responding.

_ You are doing him a favour_, she thought. _ You are putting him out of his misery. Of his suffering. One bullet for him, one for you. He won’t feel anything. You won’t feel anything. Much nicer than being ripped apart by werewolves, anyways. You’ll be free. You won’t feel anything. You can end it, right there. You spent enough time on this world. No more burden. No more curse. _

She took a breath. In, out.

He did the same, shallow, but there; Kelly knew because of the gust of white mist dispersing above his slightly parted lips. In, out – 

_ I decide that you deserve to live, Nachtigall, _she had said.

_ I need to get back _, Thomas had said.

_ If it wasn’t for hope, what was it all for? _

Her hands trembled, and she steadied them by pressing the pistol onto his skull even harder. 

And then, she took another breath, and he took another improbable breath, in, out, and he was still alive, and she was still there, and it _ hurt_. 

But that was what surviving was about, right? That was what the last days had tried to show her. 

What he had, unwillingly, forced her to confront. 

Because there would be a point when the numbness would turn into hurting. Into suffering. Where surviving would mean not being numb. But to care. 

And not going on despite the hurt, despite the caring. But _ because _ of it, because it meant that you could go on, that you could overcome, that you could be alive after surviving.

She sat there, and after what felt like an eternity, like longer than all her thousand years on this earth, she put the pistol back to where he had kept it inside his uniform. 

She couldn’t, because she was still alive – and he was still alive, still surviving for however long – and she cared. And deep down, Kelly knew – even with time being broken – that she had never stopped caring to begin with.

The snowflakes had started to fall again, and she watched them, alone this time; and at some point, they became blurred through her eyes, but she still whispered, hoping he’d hear:

“It’s beautiful.”

And then the tears dropped down from her cheeks and onto his, where they beaded on his eyelashes and the stubbles of his beard; but Kelly didn’t shut her eyelids against it, to keep them back, because when she finally realised that she was crying, the tears were not dropping anymore but flowing freely.

She hadn’t dared to cry when her sisters died, out of fear that she would not be able to stop the flood that might follow after that very first tear. 

When her Mama had died, she had wanted to, but couldn’t, and she had thought she had suppressed it for so long that she had lost the ability to ever cry again. 

And yet, Kelly cried, and the realisation hit her with the harshness of a shard of ice rammed through her body. 

The sob broke out of her, and she stifled the ones that followed by gathering Thomas further up into the embrace of her arms, cradling him against her chest, and pressing her face into his shoulders, and she cried – for the millions of lives that were lost; all of the unimaginable suffering; the tear of death brought over her community – her family; her sisters and her Mama, ripped out of time.

Ripped away from her, forever, unable to save them – and then too petrified, too broken, too bereft of her belief to save anyone, just _ anyone _ – while she had to stay and watch and survive.

_ Verzeiht mir_, she thought, again and again. _ Es tut mir so leid. Verzeiht mir. _

Kelly cried for the dying man she held in her arms.

And in the end, she cried for herself; and she cried until the hollowness inside her had filled up with the flood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
die Nachtigall = the Nightingale  
Wehrmacht = 1934-1945 name of the armed forces of the Third Reich, founded in 1921 as Reichswehr  
"Verdammte Scheiße" = fucking shit  
Danke = Thank you  
Ja = Yes / Nein = No / Bitte = Please  
Erde zu Erde, Asche zu Asche, Staub zu Staub = Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust [religious/Christian term accompanying the ritual to strew dirt three times over a coffin]  
ein Praktizierender = a practitioner  
Hilf mir = Help me  
Hier ist nichts, ihr habt nichts gesehen, ihr habt nichts gespürt, ihr könnt gehen = there is nothing here, you saw nothing, you felt nothing, you can go away  
geh [singular] / geht [plural] = go (away)  
Römerbrücke = Roman Bridge  
Ich verspreche es = I promise (you)  
Verzeiht mir, es tut mir so leid = forgive me, I am so sorry  
\------  
German and French Side Rivers of the Mosel named in this chapter, not a complete list / (Kelly's sisters):  
die Salm = Salome  
die Elz = Elzie  
die Lieser = Liesel  
die Alf = Alfie  
die Sauer = Ursa  
le Madon, la Meurthe = Madon and Meurthe  
la Mosellotte = Lotte  
\------  
Here we go...  
I dived very deep into headcanon territory here, I know, but that's what came to me and had to be written down. I never intended this to become so long, but in the end, it had to be to do the story I wanted to tell about surviving justice, especially concerning dynamics between those two and Kelly's emotional journey, which has grown very, very close to my own heart.  
Cookies for everyone who managed to pull through (because I know that this is heavy stuff).  
I poured everything I had into this and deeply hope that I managed to do justice.  
Thank you as well for all of your amazing, motivating feedback on chapter one - I was truly floored by the response I've gotten. You are the best and continue to keep a gal going :)  
I hope you enjoy reading, and the next and final chapter will probably arrive in about two weeks time since I've got an exam coming up.  
Because I've forgotten on the first chapter: English is not my native language, and if you come across any grammar of spelling errors, feel free to point them out to me.  
Thank you all, again, from the deepest bottom of my heart <3


End file.
